German Literature

by Nicholas Boyle

  In taking the life of Nietzsche as its model for the life-story of Adrian Leverkühn, and his apparent purchase of world-changing artistic achievement at the cost of syphilitic dementia, it asserts the typicality of a fi gure whose thinking was all-pervasive in 20th-century Germany and who contributed in his own way to what passed for Nazi ideology. It is shot through with allusions to earlier phases of destructive irrationalism in German literature and history, and above all it appropriates the central myth of modern German literature to suggest that the story of Leverkühn 141

  parallels the story of modern Germany, for both are the story of a Faustian pact with the devil. Links with contemporary reality punctuate the narrative, which is in the hands of Leverkühn’s friend, Serenus Zeitblom, a retired schoolteacher, who starts his work, like Mann, in 1943 and ends in the chaos of total defeat in 1945. The ultimate refi nement in this supremely complex work, however, is that, for all the apparent concentration on the artist fi gure Leverkühn and his assimilation to the fi gure of Faust, the true representative of Germany in it is Zeitblom. Zeitblom is a state offi cial, steeped in the classics and German literature, who shares Thomas Mann’s ‘unpolitical’ attitude to the First World War, but not his post-war conversion; he does not emigrate, he has two Nazi sons, and he dissents from Hitler’s policies only quietly, on aesthetic grounds, and as they start to fail. Germany’s fate is here represented not by Faust, Art, and the life lived in extremis, but by the man who believes in these ideas, who needs them to give colour and signifi cance to his life, and who structures his ature er narrative in accordance with them. The moral climax of the book, the point when it represents directly the sadistic monstrosity of the Third Reich, is Zeitblom’s chapter-long account of the German Lit

  agonizing death from meningitis of Leverkühn’s fi ve-year-old nephew, supposedly fetched by the devil. For a dozen pages this narrator tortures a child to death to justify his own desire to live out a myth. His fellows did as much across German-occupied Europe. In Zeitblom (the name means ‘fl ower of the age’), Thomas Mann created an image of the German class that saw itself as defi ned by ‘culture’ and that accepted Hitler as its monarch, its metaphysical destiny, and its nemesis.

  (ii) Learning to mourn (1945– )

  In 1967 the psychologists Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich (1908–82 and 1917– ) published The Inability to Mourn ( Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern), an analysis of Germany’s collective reaction to the trauma of 1945, the ‘zero hour’ in German history when the past was lost, the present was a ruin, and the future was 142

  a blank. Their conclusion was that there had been no reaction: Germany had frozen emotionally, had deliberately forgotten both its huge affective investment in the Third Reich and the terrible human price paid by itself and others to rid it of that delusion, had shrugged off its old identity and identifi ed instead with the victors (whether America in the West or Russia in the East), and had thrown itself into the mindless labour of reconstruction, which created the Western ‘economic miracle’ and made East Germany the most successful economy in the Soviet bloc. This analysis, and in particular its conclusion that Nazi thinking was still as omnipresent in (West) German society as the old Nazis themselves, had a powerful infl uence on the revolutionary generation of 1968 and reinforced the accepted wisdom that

  ‘coming to terms with the past’ ( Vergangenheitsbewältigung) was Tr

  the major task of contemporary literature. But there was a good aumas and memories (1914– )

  deal more to mourn than unacknowledged Nazism, repressed memories of Nazi crimes, the horrors of civilian bombardment, the misery of military defeat, or the uncomfortable fact that in the four years before the foundation of the two post-war German states in 1949 the prevailing mood was not joy and relief but sullen resentment both of the Allies and of the German emigrants.

  There was the further complication that the past calling out to be reassessed did not begin in 1933, it was potentially as old as Germany itself, while the present, for all the talk of reconstruction, had no historical precedents. It might resemble the aftermath of the Thirty Years War, though without the princes, but more importantly it was without a bourgeoisie: both German states were workers’ states – one was just wealthier than the other. But because in the Eastern German state the absolutist rule of offi cials survived under the name of ‘socialism’, it created an image of its Western rival on the model of offi cialdom’s old enemy and characterized the Federal Republic as ‘bourgeois’

  Germany. With the building of the Wall in 1961, this double illusion was set in concrete and barbed wire and exercised an increasingly malign infl uence on German intellectual life on both sides of the barrier. For the greatest obstacle to clear-sighted 143

  assessment of the present and the past was a factor which the Mitscherlichs did not mention: that neither of the world powers which had divided Germany between them wished to encourage it. Rather, they wanted their front-line German states, between which the Iron Curtain ran, to understand themselves as showcases for their respective blocs in the bipolar global system.

  ‘Denazifi cation’ procedures were stopped in the West, and held to be unnecessary in the East. Only after 1990 were German writers released from this imposed and misleading confrontation, and as they became free to understand Germany’s position in a global market and a global culture in which national identities had long been dissolving, they also became free to address their own history.

  After 1945, many emigrants stayed where they were or avoided settling in Germany. By this time they were anyway largely exhausted. Thomas Mann, who returned to Switzerland, and ature er Hesse, who continued to live there, were honoured – Hesse with the Nobel Prize in 1946 – but unproductive. The Communists returned to the Russian zone, but apart from Brecht they had German Lit

  little international standing. Adorno came back in 1949 to a professorship in Frankfurt, where the Institute for Social Research was reopened in 1951. In the West the task of reacting in literature to the traumatic past was in the hands of a new generation of ex-servicemen and ex-prisoners of war, many of whom arranged to meet annually to discuss their work and became known as

  ‘Group 47’ ( Gruppe 47). For this new generation, the problem of inheritance was particularly evident in poetry. Adorno’s famous dictum of 1949 that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’

  refl ected partly the special role of lyrical poetry in Germany as the literary medium for the exploration of individual ethical experience. That this role was over was emphatically stated in the last phase of the work of Gottfried Benn, which became known to the public in the early 1950s. Despite the Nazi prohibition, he had continued to write in secret, especially what he called

  ‘static poems’, regular in form and rich in imagery of autumn and 144

  extinction. A collection privately circulated in 1943 contained one of his greatest poems, ‘Farewell’ (‘ Abschied’), a tormented admission that in 1933 he had betrayed ‘my word, my light from heaven’, and that it was impossible to come to terms with such a past: ‘ Wem das geschah, der muß sich wohl vergessen’ (‘Anyone to whom that happened will have to forget himself ’). After this personal outcry, his public stance of unyielding nihilism, in the post-war years, was entirely consistent:

  es gibt nur zwei Dinge: die Leere

  und das gezeichnete Ich

  [there are only two things: emptiness and the constructed self ]

  Traumas and memories (1914– )

  (‘ Nur zwei Dinge’, 1953)

  If the self has become pure construction, not made out of interactions with its past experiences or with a given world, there is no place for poetry as it had been practised in Germany from Goethe to Lasker-Schüler. The poet who showed Adorno that it was still possible to write poetry in the knowledge of Auschwitz had certainly understood this lesson. There is no role for a self, or for any controlling construction, in the work of Paul Celan (1920–70), a German Jew from Romania, both of whose p
arents were killed in a death-camp, and who chose to live in Paris, where he committed suicide.

  Celan is best known for the fi nest single lament for the Jewish genocide, ‘Death Fugue’ (‘ Todesfuge’), an erratic block in the otherwise over-lush collection Poppies and Memory ( Mohn und Gedächtnis, 1952), but he seems to have felt that even this impersonal, repetitive musical structure, with its motifs of

  ‘black milk’, ‘ashen hair’, the name of Jewish beauty, ‘ Sulamit’, and the terrifying climactic phrase ‘death is a master from Germany’ (‘ der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland’), imposed too much of a subjective order on a strictly unthinkable event.

  145

  ature er

  German Lit

  18. Paul Celan in 1967

  In his later collections (e.g. Speechgrid [ Sprachgitter], 1959; Breathturn [ Atemwende], 1967), he thought of the poem as a

  ‘meridian’, an imaginary line both linking disparate words and names and events and, by its arbitrariness, holding them apart, so re-enacting the meaninglessly violent juxtapositions and discontinuities of 20th-century history. Although many of the 146

  elements, including the vocabulary, are hermetically personal, the call for interpretation that these Webern-like miniatures embody makes them strangely public statements in which the anguish of the bereaved survivor is largely uncontaminated by Germany’s growing ideological division.

  […] Stimmen im Innern der Arche:

  Es sind

  nur die Münder

  geborgen. Ihr

  Tr

  Sinkenden, hört

  aumas and memories (1914– )

  auch uns. […]

  [ Voices inside the Ark: Only our mouths are rescued. You who are sinking, hear us too]

  At the same time as Benn was marking the end of poetry as the coherent utterance of a solitary private voice, Brecht was providing it with a new role as the public voice of personal political engagement. He proved by far the strongest infl uence on the poetry of both the Federal and the Democratic Republics, but the infl uence was as ambiguous as the engagement. Brecht had returned to Europe in 1947 and, prevented by the Americans from entering the Western zone, settled instead in the East, where he was given a theatre and a privileged position as the jewel in the new republic’s cultural crown. While he did not publicly oppose the military suppression of the workers’ revolt in 1953, he wrote a series of epigrammatic poems sardonically distancing himself from the action (perhaps the government should elect itself a new people?) and asserting, presumably as a justifi cation of his position as court poet, the social value of 147

  literary pleasure. The example both of this last, laconic manner and of his earlier more discursive poetry enabled later poets to address public issues with directness and, often, lightness of touch. But his accommodation with the Communist régime and his failure to unmask either its false claim to cultural continuity with the German ‘classical heritage’ or the reality of its institutional continuity with the bureaucracy of the Third and Second Empires set a bad precedent. Even the most gifted West German poet of the next generation, Hans Magnus Enzensberger (born 1929), succumbed to the assumption that the complacencies and contradictions of life in the Federal Republic lit up by his satirical fi reworks were somehow a consequence of the division of the world between Right and Left. It seemed to him (as it did to all of us) that to be modern was to be subject to the threat of thermonuclear Mutual Assured Destruction by these two opposing systems. When, therefore, he wrote a counter-poem to Brecht’s ‘To later generations’, he began it with an equation ature er of the Cold War and the Second War which became obsolete in 1989:

  German Lit

  wer soll da noch auftauchen aus der fl ut,

  wenn wir darin untergehen?

  [who else is supposed to emerge from the tide if we sink in it?]

  (‘Extension’ [‘ Weiterung’])

  By contrast, Celan’s revision of Brecht’s poem gets much closer to the heart of Germany’s diffi culty with its past-haunted present.

  Poetry, Celan knew, needed a purifi cation of language and memory, not the prescription of acceptable topics:

  […] Was sind das für Zeiten,

  wo ein Gespräch

  148

  beinah ein Verbrechen ist,

  weil es soviel Gesagtes

  mit einschließt?

  [What sort of times are these when any conversation is almost a crime because it includes so much that has been said?]

  (‘A Leaf ’ [‘ Ein Blatt’], 1971)

  In drama, Brecht, of course, was everywhere. He wrote nothing of importance after his return to Germany, but in his decade with the Berliner Ensemble he created a model of modernist, politically didactic theatre which, while at fi rst having little effect Traumas and memories (1914– )

  on the resolutely Second Empire traditions of production in the East, gained great authority in the West, especially after 1968, and made it possible to conceal a lack of direct engagement with the literary heritage beneath an appearance of critical detachment.

  The institutional continuity, however, was virtually unbroken: as in 1918, Germany’s theatres survived the revolution and not for 20 years did major new writing talent emerge. Even then the function assigned to the theatre by a new generation of producers and writers was what it had always been, except in the brief bourgeois period before 1914 – to be a state institution in which the intellectual elite could through Art perfect the morals of the citizens (or subjects). The plays of Rolf Hochhuth (born 1931) do not deny their Schillerian ancestry. His denunciation of Pope Pius XII for complicity in the murder of Europe’s Jews ( The Representative [ Der Stellvertreter], 1963) was written in fi ve acts and a form of blank verse, and concentrated on issues of personal moral responsibility. Hochhuth’s determination to fi nd highly placed individuals to blame for great crimes – Churchill in Soldiers ( Soldaten, 1967); Hans Filbinger, the prime minister of Baden-Württemberg, in Lawyers ( Juristen, 1979) – was on occasion highly effective (Filbinger was forced to resign). But it 149

  did not help a broader understanding of the historical and cultural context that made the crimes possible. Moral improvement might not seem to be the purpose of the explosively entertaining and hugely successful fi rst play of Peter Weiss (1916–82), a Jewish emigrant and Communist who had lived in Sweden since 1939.

  The Persecution and Murder of Jean Paul Marat Represented by the Theatre Company of the Hospital of Charenton under the Direction of M. de Sade, usually known as Marat/Sade (1964), plays to the gallery with sex, violence, and madness, slithering between illusion and reality, with songs and self-conscious effects in the manner of the early Brecht, and with an early Brechtian theme: the confl ict between the isolated hedonist, Sade, and Marat, the spokesman of impersonal and collective revolutionary action. But Weiss himself saw it as a Marxist play, and in his next, much grimmer, work, The Investigation (Die Ermittlung, 1965), a documentary drama drawing on the transcripts of the recent trial in Frankfurt of some of the staff in Auschwitz, he selected ature er his material in accordance with the thesis of Brecht’s Third Reich plays: that Hitler could be explained by the logic of big business.

  Weiss’s ideas were formed in the 1930s and contributed minimally German Lit

  to German self-understanding. The three volumes of his last work, the novel Aesthetics of Resistance ( Ästhetik des Widerstands, 1975–81), reiterated the fallacy that had done so much damage in the inter-war years: that ‘ Bildung’ was a supra-historical value with no particular basis in the German class structure. In the GDR, by contrast, Heiner Müller (1929–95), as director of the Berliner Ensemble, combined his own passionate demand for humanistic socialism, which he felt states always betray, with Brechtian devices taken to a postmodernist extreme, to create extraordinarily powerful works which frequently proved too much for the GDR authorities and had little in common with the armchair leftism prevalent in the Federal Republic. In a loose cycle which opened with Germania
Death in Berlin ( Germania Tod in Berlin, 1977) and closed with its intertextual counterpart Germania 3 Ghosts at The Dead Man ( Germania 3 Gespenster am Toten Mann, 1996), a lament for the GDR, Müller puts bodies, 150

  language, and history through the mincing machine; cannibalism, mutilation, and sexual perversion abound; theatrical conventions are strained to the limit and beyond; and the contributions of Prussian militarism, Nazism, and Stalinism to the formation of the modern German states are brutally demonstrated. These plays have the uninhibited wildness of true mourning. However, since their underlying assumption is that the real victim of the German past has been socialism, they are mourners at the wrong funeral.

  As for narrative prose, the sharpest insights tend to be found at the beginning of the period of German division, before the confrontation of the two republics had been consolidated. Much of the best writing of Heinrich Böll (1917–85) is in the disillusioned Tr

  and understated short stories he wrote in the immediate post-war aumas and memories (1914– )

  years: stories of military chaos and defeat, of shattered cities and lives, of the black market, hunger, and cigarettes. Traveller, if you come to Spa … ( Wanderer, kommst du nach Spa … , 1950) is the interior monologue of a fatally wounded ex-sixth-former carried to an emergency operating theatre in the school he left only months before. He recognizes the room from a fragment of Simonides’ epigram on Thermopylae which he had himself written on the blackboard, and most of the brief narrative is taken up with enumeration of the cultural objects that still litter the corridors – the bust of Caesar, the portraits of Frederick the Great and Nietzsche, the illustrations of Nordic racial types.